War Lies Are Piling Up by Ivan Elandwww.dissidentvoice.org
October 5, 2004

Even
though a mound of evidence keeps accumulating that the Bush administration
exaggerated the threat to fulfill its obsession to invade Iraq,
administration officials keep standing by—in Goebbels-like repetition of the
“big lie”—the need for war.

Despite virtually admitting
that she was disingenuous about Iraq’s nuclear threat, Condoleezza Rice,
President Bush’s national security advisor, in an October 3, 2004 interview
with ABC television, again defended the administration’s decision to remove
Saddam Hussein’s regime. In a prior September 8, 2002 interview with CNN,
Ms. Rice stated flatly that aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were “only
really suited for nuclear weapons programs.” Then she made the threat even
more vivid by concluding that, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a
mushroom cloud.” The only problem is that two anonymous administration
officials told the New York Times that Ms. Rice knew that Iraq’s potential
use for the tubes was in hot dispute within the U.S. government at the time
of the CNN interview. Caught red-handed, Ms. Rice, in the ABC appearance,
acknowledged that she knew of the disagreement at the time of the CNN
interview but claimed that she didn’t know “the nature of the dispute” then.
Yet months before the interview, the government’s top nuclear experts in the
Energy Department, who believed that the tubes were the wrong size to be
used to make nuclear weapons, conveyed this information to Ms. Rice’s staff.

But the recent hubbub about
Ms. Rice’s dissembling obscures bigger whoppers told by an even higher-level
official-Vice President Dick Cheney. At the beginning of the Bush
administration in 2001, the U.S. intelligence community reached a consensus
that Iraq’s nuclear program had been eviscerated by international
inspections and sanctions and had not been restarted. This official opinion
was not changed until Oct. 2, 2002—little more than a week before the Senate
vote on going to war—with the release of a new National Intelligence
Estimate on Iraq demanded by Senate Democrats. (Even then the new estimate,
concluding that Iraq was again actively pursuing nuclear weapons, depended
principally on the questionable evidence that aluminum tubes were being used
for that purpose and the now discredited allegation that Iraq was seeking to
buy uranium from the African nation of Niger.) Yet before this new estimate
was released, Vice President Cheney, in a major speech to the Veterans of
Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002 and during two TV interviews (in March 2002
and the same day Ms. Rice made her CNN appearance), declared flatly that
Iraq had reconstituted its quest to acquire nuclear weapons. Thus, the
intelligence assessment didn’t support the vice president’s assertions at
the time he made them and seemingly was later changed to conform to them.

Of course, the world now
knows Cheney’s and Rice’s bald assertions were nonsense, as the
administration’s own State Department argued. More remarkably, on January
27, 2003, a couple of months before the invasion started, the International
Atomic Energy Agency—which provided the nuclear inspectors that Saddam
Hussein permitted to enter Iraq in order to avoid war—discovered no evidence
that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program and determined that the aluminum
tubes were probably being used for the purpose that Iraq had stated.

According to the Times,
that same January, White House officials helping to draft Secretary of State
Colin Powell’s speech before the United Nations, justifying the invasion,
sent word to the intelligence community that evidence of the Iraqi nuclear
threat was weak. One often hears about policy improperly dictating
intelligence—when facts should really drive policy—but such blatant and
egregious conduct by high administration officials is still quite shocking.

For the administration, the
nuclear issue was paramount for justifying the war because chemical and
biological weapons are not really “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD).
Technical hurdles to converting chemical and biological agents into weapons
and successfully employing them make it challenging to achieve the goal of
inflicting mass casualties using them. Also, historically, bombing with
conventional ordnance has killed more people than chemical attacks, in part
because of the limited area that can be covered with a single chemical
weapon.

Of course, the “WMD”
rationale, including the nuclear threat, was just that—a dubious
justification for the invasion rather than the actual reason for it. If it
had been the actual reason for war, the U.S. military would have immediately
secured Iraq’s “WMD” facilities after invading. That was not done.

Thus, the administration
lied about why it went to war in the first place and then about the evidence
to support the phony justification. Mothers teach their children that liars
eventually get caught because one lie requires others to hide the first. In
the future, Bush administration officials should pay heed to mom’s astute
advice.